In this installment to the organization’s popular Rooster Road Trip adventure, Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever’s Andrew Vavra, Renee Tomala, and Emily Spolyar to recap the crew’s second pheasant-filled day in North Dakota. The team starts the day on a fresh PLOTS (Private Land Open To Sportsmen) parcel with NDSU biologist and PF Chapter President Ben Geaumont leading the hunt. Episode Highlights: • Vavra provides the play-by-play of the crew’s hunt through another birdy PLOTS t...
Nov 12, 2021•31 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever’s Andrew Vavra, Renee Tomala, and Emily Spolyar to recap the first day of the organization’s annual Rooster Road Trip. Recorded live from Emily Spolyar’s home on the prairie, which was once a North Dakota pheasant hunting lodge. The crew details a very birdy start to the 2021 Rooster Road Trip on the state’s publicly accessible lands. Episode Highlights: • Emily and Renee talk about relocating to North Dakota for their roles with Pheasants Foreve...
Nov 04, 2021•34 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever’s Andrew Vavra, Marissa Jensen, and Renee Tomala from the field. In fact, this episode was literally recorded live on a gravel road next to a North Dakota PLOTS (Private Land Open To Sportsmen) parcel as the crew prepared to kick off the twelfth annual installment of the organization’s popular Rooster Road Trip. Episode Highlights: • As with all previous Rooster Road Trip events, the Pheasants Forever team of employees, biologists, and chapter le...
Oct 28, 2021•33 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Douglas Spale, a hardcore bird hunter and newest member of the Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever National Board of Directors. The guys talk about Douglas’ Nebraska roots, his “Bird Dog in the City” blog series, and how our podcast episode with Erik Petersen changed his life’s trajectory. Episode Highlights: • The guys kick off the conversation with Spale’s impressions upon returning from his first ruffed grouse and woodcock hunt in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, a star...
Oct 19, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Tom “Carp” Carpenter, editor of the Pheasants Forever Journal, joins host Bob St.Pierre to add color to his recent PF Journal story “Hunting With the Wind.” In the podcast, as in the printed story, Carp offers eleven tips for handling wind during a bird hunt. Episode Highlights: • Bob admits to historically not paying very close attention to wind conditions in favor of assessing habitat and following the dog, while Carp breaks down the error of Bob’s old ways. • Carp talks about his journaling h...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Reid Bryant, host of the Orvis Hunting and Shooting Podcast, and Chad Love, Quail Forever Journal’s editor, for a free-flowing conversation covering strong opinions about bird hunting influencers on Instagram and great bird hunting literature. Episode Highlights: • There is clear chemistry between Bryant and Love who share a mutual passion for literature featuring bird hunting themes and settings from icons the likes of Jim Fergus, Annie Proulx, Harry Middleton, G...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Tom Carpenter, editor of the Pheasants Forever Journal, joins host Bob St.Pierre to break down his recent article about identifying quality pheasant habitat by focusing on grass, grain, and winter cover. Episode Highlights: • Bob and Tom talk about the importance of grass and forb identification as part of a hunter’s ability to locate birds. They also spend some time discussing how grass density plays into recognizing a good place to bird hunt. • The guys also chat about finding pheasants, quail...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s Director of Government Affairs Jim Inglis for a conversation with Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation’s Chris Horton and Kent Keene. Chris and Kent explain how CSF works on three different government levels (federal, state, and gubernatorial) to advance habitat, hunting, and angling legislation across the country. Episode Highlights: The crew goes around the horn on a variety of legislative issues, including: o Right to hunt ...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 28 min
Host Bob St.Pierre visits with David Nolt and filmmaker Erik Petersen about the production Long Way Home released by Pheasants Forever earlier this month. Long Way Home is a film about loss, second chances, identity, bird dogs and the power of hunting to connect people to places all through the eyes of Nolt and captured through Petersen’s camera. Episode Highlights: • Bob compares Long Way Home to Field of Dreams and shares his perspective on the parallels between “having a catch” and “going bir...
Sep 15, 2021•56 min
This week, ten organizations have joined forces to unveil a vision for new grasslands conservation legislation modeled upon the successful North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA). Host Bob St.Pierre leads a discussion with the presidents & chief executive officers of three of those partner groups. Through this important conversation, Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s Howard Vincent, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ Land Tawney, and National Wildlife Federation’s Collin O’Mara ...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Oklahoma State Professor Dwayne Elmore returns to the podcast with his better half Leslie Elmore, Quail Forever’s coordinating biologist for Oklahoma. Whistle along as the couple share their love for quail, habitat, cooking, and of course bird dogs with host Bob St. Pierre. Episode Highlights: • The pair share their path to the uplands and how they became Oklahoma’s leaders for quail research and habitat restoration. • Leslie shares her expertise on the connection between bats and quality quail ...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr
Larisa Harding, Arizona Game & Fish Department’s small game program manager, and Jim Heffelfinger, Arizona Game & Fish Department’s wildlife science coordinator, join host Bob St.Pierre for a conversation about Arizona’s Gambel’s, scaled, and Mearns’ quail. Larisa and Jim tag-team a fascinating discussion about how each of these three quail species reproduce at different times and gravitate to different habitats, making this year’s wild weather conditions a boon for some and a bust for o...
Aug 25, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Host Bob St.Pierre and Precision Agriculture & Conservation Specialist, Emily Spolyar, talk with new upland bird hunter Jennifer Reilly about chasing challenging species right out of the gates. Reilly started her upland journey in pursuit of chukar, progressed to mountain quail, and now lives in Alaska where she is figuring out ptarmigan. Episode Highlights: • The episode kicks off with Spolyar (@ecspolyar), who is based in North Dakota, providing an August pheasant report as the drought per...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min
August marks the annual roadside surveying of pheasants and quail by state natural resource agencies. Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Iowa DNR’s Todd Bogenschutz, the state’s upland wildlife research biologist, and PF & QF’s Jared Wiklund, the organization’s public relations manager, for a conversation about the logistics and science of counting game birds along roadsides in late summer. Episode Highlights: • Bogenschutz talks about his New York roots and the South Dakota schooling that resu...
Aug 12, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Mike Retterer, the organization’s National Rights of Way & Energy Coordinator, for a thought-provoking conversation about the organization’s efforts to create wildlife habitat along roads, railroads, solar fields, pipelines, and powerlines. While obviously not the pinnacle of opportunities to create habitat for upland game birds or hunters, these marginal acres serve multiple purposes in creating connectivity between habitat “hubs,” while also introducing the ...
Jul 28, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by television personality Travis Frank for a conversation previewing the new season of The Flush, airing on Outdoor Channel during the months of July through December. The conversation starts with a few entertaining stories of Travis’ new bird dog pup Daisy before diving into what to expect from the new season. Episode Highlights: • The guys talk about the increase in episodes this season that include a camping element to the hunt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and ho...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min
David Gutierrez, Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s new regional representative for the southwestern United States, spent 2005 through 2015 as a Green Beret in South America and Afghanistan. After returning to the United States from war, David struggled to find peace until he got a bird dog and started upland hunting. Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Marissa Jensen, our Path to the Uplands content leader, for a thought-provoking conversation with David on finding solace in the outdoors. Episod...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Hundreds of thousands of bird hunters travel to South Dakota and North Dakota each autumn to hunt roosters. With bird populations on the rise the last few years, coupled with a very mild winter in 2020, anticipation for the season ahead was skyrocketing . . . until a dry spring turned into a summer drought. Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Rachel Bush, Pheasants Forever’s state coordinator for North Dakota, and Matt Morlock, PF’s state coordinator for South Dakota, to get an on-the-ground assessm...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 22 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Dr. Scott Taylor, a biologist and the National Wild Pheasant Conservation Plan Coordinator. The conversation includes how the National Wild Pheasant Conservation Plan was created to provide a blueprint for restoring and maintaining pheasant populations across the country. Written by biologists from 24 state wildlife agencies, the plan details the habitat needed to support a national pheasant harvest goal of at least 5.9 million roosters based on a multi-state habi...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 17 min
Did you know healthy pollinator habitat is great upland gamebird habitat? The plants that bees and butterflies rely on are the exact same insect-producing flowers that help pheasant and quail broods thrive. Pollinators also impact 75% of the global food supply, which is scary because our pollinator populations are in a steep decline. Enter bird hunting conservationists to the rescue! Host Bob St. Pierre and Pheasants Forever & Quail Forever’s Anna Swerczek and Drew Larsen discuss the organiz...
Jun 21, 2021•57 min
Working Lands for Wildlife is the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s premier approach for conserving America’s working lands to benefit people, wildlife, and rural communities. This innovative approach is expanding into America’s Great Plains to restore and protect the critical grasslands there. Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Tim Griffiths, NRCS’s Western Regional Coordinator; Dean Krehbiel, NRCS’s State Resources Conservationist for Kansas; and Chris McLeland, Pheasants Forever and ...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 33 min
Thanks to Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s social media audience, we crowdsourced questions on bird dog health and nutrition for this special “Ask the Experts” episode featuring veterinarian Dr. Seth Bynum and Purina’s Karl Gunzer. Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever Director of Marketing Andrew Vavra joins host Bob St.Pierre for this entertaining and extremely informative conversation. Episode Highlights: • We received a lot of questions about bloat, twisted stomach, and stomach torsion (a...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 35 min
Host Bob St. Pierre is joined by Public Relations Manager and habitat junkie Jared Wiklund for a conversation with Jim Wooley, the first biologist Pheasants Forever ever hired. Wooley talks about leaving a great job as the Iowa DNR’s upland bird biologist to join the fledgling habitat non-profit in 1985. Wooley is also credited as one of the biologists who helped create Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s Signature Series seed program and is an expert on habitat management, including the estab...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Our story starts on a school bus in Tennessee with two childhood friends and ends with a vision for healthy quail habitat spanning from southern Pennsylvania all the way to central Texas. Host Bob St.Pierre is joined for this episode by Dr. Dwayne Estes, known as the “Prairie Preacher,” Quail Forever biologist Brittney Viers, and new QF Program Manager Andy Edwards for a conversation about Quail Forever’s partnership with the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative and how the groups are working toge...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 24 min
Brothers Sam & Josh Soholt, owners of Public Land Tees, take a break from turkey camp to join host Bob St.Pierre for a chat about their love of hunting and their commitment to conservation. Highlighted during the discussion is the brother’s “Conservation Crossing” effort, which is helping Pheasants Forever, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Mule Deer Foundation, Delta Waterfowl, and National Wild Turkey Federation generate members through a creative t-shirt promotion. Episode Highlights: • ...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Brad Bortner, a bird biologist and the recently retired chief of migratory bird management at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, for a conversation about the federal Harvest Information Program (HIP) for migratory birds. All bird hunters are asked about HIP certification when they purchase a small game license, and this is a discussion to explore what those questions mean and how the data is used. Episode Highlights: • Bortner talks about how his career brought...
May 12, 2021•44 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Chad Harvey, the organization’s regional representative for Montana, the Pacific Norwest, Canada, and Alaska, for a conversation with brothers Tyler and Brad Heine. The Heine brothers are Pheasants Forever volunteers in Montana with jobs that are slow in the winter which has allowed them to hunt wild bobwhite, Mearns, Gambel’s, scaled, valley, and mountain quail across the West. Episode Highlights: • The brothers share tips for finding and hunting the “Quail Slam”...
May 05, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Our Women on the Wing Program Manager Marissa Jensen leads this episode’s fun conversation with MeatEater’s Danielle Prewett for a conversation about the organization’s upcoming virtual event on May 6th. Episode Highlights: • Danielle talks about her Deutsch-Drahthaar named “Zissou” as a nod to both the movie “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” and the oceanographer. There are some good laughs about “Z” stealing the show during last year’s virtual event. • Danielle discusses her plans for prepa...
Apr 29, 2021•37 min
Host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Amanda & Andy Doak for the story about how they fell in love through a mutual affiliation with the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association (NAVHDA). Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s Hunting Heritage Program Manager Colby Kerber also joins the conversation to talk about Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s partnership with NAVHDA. Episode Highlights: • Amanda talks about how welcoming NAVHDA is to women, her affinity for Pudelpointers, and her pe...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr
Nicole Qualtieri tuned in to Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s recent Call of the Uplands campaign video launch at the same time she was studying America’s massive decline in bird numbers resulting from habitat loss. Our campaign’s bold effort to improve 9 million acres of habitat resonated deep within Nicole and she’s emerged as a vocal advocate for wildlife habitat conservation. During this episode, host Bob St.Pierre is joined by Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever’s Director of Marketing...
Apr 21, 2021•1 hr 30 min
